Monthly Archives: September 2007

I want to inform you that the release branch has been created, from which Lightning and Sunbird 0.7 will be released. The name of this branch is SUNBIRD_0_7_BRANCH.

Please note that code checkins on this branch are restricted. You
will need the approval from our lead developer, Daniel Boelzle, before you commit changes
to that branch. Localizers do not need approval for checkins on this branch.

Developers and localizers should however make sure, that all changes are committed to the trunk, the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH and the SUNBIRD_0_7_BRANCH in parallel. This is to avoid inconsistencies as we do parallel development on the trunk and the branches.

Thanks for bearing with us as we missed the initially proposed release date for our first release candidate (RC1), which was originally scheduled to be mid-september. This will hopefully be the last status update before the RC1.

The current plan (as of yesterday evening) is to create a release branch today, create the RC1 release builds, do a short smoketest and release those builds as the official 0.7 RC1 within this week.

As you can see from the list below, we have taken some fixes pretty late in the game to give you a better and more stable user experience once 0.7 is released. Our localizers have also been pretty busy and we are proud to report that we’ll have 24 non-English languages for the RC1 (3 more than for 0.5) and hopefully 1 or 2 more (Argentinian Spanish and Mongolian) for the final release.

We are in code freeze, and our first Release Candidate (RC1) will be ready soon. We need YOU to find every problem which can stop a release. There also is a long list of bugs fixed since the release of 0.5, that have to be verified fixed on different operating systems. At last almost all l10n teams finished their localizations of Lightning and Sunbird. Now we – but especially native speakers – have to check these language versions for completeness and correctness.

We need your help to deliver a good quality release.

So, join us in #calendar-qa on Tuesday. All the information on the test day is in our usual Test Day Wiki Page.

Another status update as we’re coming ever closer to the first release candidate (RC1) of the upcoming 0.7 release. The most notable fix is probably the fix to bug 393387 which will hopefully take care of all the disappearing events issues, that some users have experienced in the 0.5 release.

The RC1 will also be the first chance for localizers to get their hands on a fully localized build of Lightning, so that the localization quality can be estimated (and maybe improved) for the final 0.7 release. To achieve this we have worked hard behind the scenes with many localizers and as of today 20 localizations other than English are ready for the RC1 (Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Spanish, Basque, French, Gaelic, Georgian, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Europe), Russian, Slovak, Swedish and (for the first time) Chinese).

Were still missing localized strings from the Hungarian, Mongolian, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi and Slovenian localizers, but hopefully we’ll be able to get localized builds for these languages as well, so that all users of the 0.5 release can update to 0.7 once it comes out.

I’m sorry for not posting a status update in nearly two weeks, but everyone has been pretty busy lately, especially with fixing bugs for the first release candidate (RC1) of the 0.7 release. We hope to have the RC1 ready sometime next week.

As you can see below, we have added a few features and fixed a lot of bugs lately. Some items are especially noteworthy, as they introduce new features or fix longstanding bugs that have plagued our users for months or even years:

Bug 387559: Event creation/change fails if server requires authentication for write but not for read

We’re really happy to get those features and bugfixes into the hands of our users. Those items, in addition to other fixes that have already been incorporated into our codebase, will definitely make 0.7 our best release ever.

Here’s the list of bugs that were also fixed since the last status update:

In today’s nightly build for Sunbird and Lightning, the fix for the “Publishing Events Bug” has landed. This bug has plagued people in 0.5, and we wanted to address it in 0.7. However, fixing it was complicated by how many different ways the bug can manifest itself.

We’d like to ask everyone that’s seen this issue to retest their configurations with the latest nightly. This way we can determine if the patch fixed all the issues.

Technical Details

More information is of course available in bugzilla. These are the main bugs we are following that track different manifestations of the problem.

Thanks for your help in checking out this issue. If you find a problem, please add a comment to bug 387559. If you find other crazy behavior, please file a new bug. If you have any questions please ask them in #calendar or #calendar-qa on IRC and we’ll try to help.

On today’s developer confcall Philipp (developer of the Google Calendar Provider extension) mentioned that his extension has been downloaded over 120.000 times.

That prompted me to look at the current download stats for Lightning and Sunbird and the results blew me away:

As of today we have 1.030.000 downloads of Lightning through our website and through addons.mozilla.org. That’s over 780.000 downloads in the last six months. Not much compared to Thunderbird or Firefox, but very much for such a small project as ours.

As of today we have nearly 1.400.000 downloads of Sunbird through our website. That’s really awesome! Sunbird has been around longer than Lightning, so the lead is to be expected.

Let me use the opportunity to say “Thank you” to all our users and supporters. We couldn’t have done this without you. We hope to bring you a great 0.7 release soon (hopefully with even more downloads).

In our status call on Wednesday, our resident skeptic, Simon, and our optimistic project lead, Daniel, got into a discussion about the 0.7 release date. The date is currently October 15, with an RC1 due on September 17. Simon said that there is no way we are going to make those dates. He cited lots of reasons for that and advocated cutting some features. Daniel remained optimistic, and agreed that some features should perhaps be cut, but we should look closer at it next week. Daniel feels confident that most of the issues will be addressed, and the dates can still be made.

They agreed to check in next week and make a decision, and the following wager was made.

If Simon is right, Daniel must buy him a bottle of Single Malt Scotch

If Daniel is right, Simon must buy him a case of his favorite German beer

The QA team has been watching the state of the project closely, keeping track of blockers and proposed blocking bugs as they are filed. This Tuesday, the QA team is doing intensive testing to gather data on the quality of Lightning and Sunbird. This information will enable the calendar team to make the crucial decision on Wednesday about the 0.7 release.

No one wants to slip the date. That said, we also want to release the highest quality product we can for 0.7, so if we have to take a week or two to ensure that, we will. We need your eyes to help us scrutinize Lightning and Sunbird on Tuesday, September 11. We need your help to ascertain the quality level of both products.

We’ll take all the data we generate — bugs, feelings, observations, etc — and post them here in a Test Day Findings post. That information will be used in the Wednesday Status call to figure out whether Simon will be drinking Scotch, or Daniel will be drinking beer.

So, join us in #calendar-qa on Tuesday. All the information on the test day is in our usual Test Day Wiki Page. Let’s figure out where we’re at, and when we’re going to release 0.7.